My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, December 4
Princeton, New Jersey
Dear friends,
Two disclaimers: I gave birth to my second child one month ago and I have not yet read the Hitler section of Book 6. Note the lack of a "thus" connecting these statements. A birth of baby—a second baby!—is a great excuse for not having reached the halfway mark. But, I hesitate to attribute my slow reading to my son. I have, in point of fact, read several books in the month since Maury was born. Maternity leave is great for reading: you're awake all the time and frequently pinioned to the couch by the awkward heft of a sleeping baby.
I've been moving through Knausgaard at glacial speed not for lack of time. Rather, his book has proved physically difficult to read quickly or comfortably. (It's psychically difficult to read too; we'll come to that.) Rachel discussed the interview in which Charlie Rose asked David Foster Wallace to respond to the feminist perception that with Infinite Jest he attempted to impose his "phallus on the consciousness of the world." A metaphorical phallus doesn't go far enough to describe My Struggle. Its imposition onto my womanhood—a womanhood whose sexual promise is both realized and ruined by maternity—is not figurative. It's impossible to hold or nurse a baby while reading Knausgaard's doorstopper. I've only been able to read it in fits and snatches while other people hold my baby. And if I'm not holding Maury, I'd rather be on a walk, or having a wine with a friend, or any number of other things that don't involve sitting on a couch. I might have described Knausgaard as a mommy blogger in my last post, but his book isn't for mothers of infants.
But, regardless of where I am in my own reading, the insightful posts of fellow Slowburners have made me ruminate on Knausgaard's fascination with Nazism and how it connects to his—and my—care of young children. Katherine's observation resonates: "The most famous inhumane person in history was, after all, a human being. For Karl Ove, this is not a koan that humanizes Hitler; it's a koan that Hitlerizes the human."
As I dress my new baby in buntings that are meant to make him resemble a bear or a puppy, I wonder why baby clothes are designed to disguise the humanness of infants. Are children cuter, less likely to trigger mixed feelings about humanity, when they don't look like children? My son's puppy paws and bear ears expose the vulnerability that he shares with these creatures but they also serve as a double veil, the animal costume masking his potential inhumanity. He is a cute animal not a threatening human animal. Similarly, children's books tend to be about animals, not children. I read somewhere that animal plotlines don't teach children empathy in the same way that stories about people do. Perhaps animal stories kindly depict a world where we would need less empathy because there would be less suffering. Parenting provides many occasions to reflect on the ways adults conceal the cruelty of our species. This is to say that raising children may be a task that asks with particular urgency the question that Katherine sees as plaguing Karl Ove: "Oh no, am I Hitler?"
Karl Ove's obsession with hygiene, particularly as it concerns his children, is one way he keeps returning to the question of his relationship to fascism. Consider this paragraph about cleaning out the bath:
I put [John] down on the floor, got the detergent from on top of the cupboard and sprinkled white Ajax powder onto the bottom of the bath, got the scouring pad from under the sink, moistened it, and began scrubbing the enamel. As it dissolved in the water, the white powder not only became liquid, it turned yellow too. I was fond of yellow. Yellow on white, yellow on green, yellow on blue. I liked lemons, their shape as well as their color, and I liked the great fields of rape that spread their intense yellow out across the Skane landscape in the spring and summer, beneath the tall blue sky, amid green. And I liked the white Ajax powder that turned yellow when dissolved in water. (229)
In this paean to Ajax, Knausgaard gives the ablutions of daily life broad aesthetic reach, where the act of cleaning the bathtub blurs by association into a vision of the idealized Swedish countryside, whose colors are pure and, in Knausgaard's imagining, obliquely connected to whiteness. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes famously dissects the cultural euphoria surrounding cleaning products, arguing that soap powders are viewed as "separating agents: their ideal role is to liberate the object from its circumstantial imperfection: dirt is 'forced out' and no longer killed'" (35). Soap powder achieves "prestige on the evidence of a result; it calls into play vanity, a social concern with appearances, by offering for comparison two objects, one of which is whiter than the other." Ajax, a white powder that turns yellow but then leaves the bathtub whiter than it was before, participates in this logic of purity achieved through comparison with the less than white.
But does this passage answer the question of Knausgaard's proximity to Hitler? No, not at all. In a way, it's simply Knausgaard at his very best, making ordinary life strange and beautiful. (I'll pause to emphasize the strangeness here. Who has ever scrubbed out the tub every single time their child took a bath?) Had Knausgaard chosen to rhapsodize about bleach instead of Ajax, perhaps it'd be easier to see him as participating in a fascist literary aesthetic. For Barthes, chlorinating solvents are predicated on violence, "the abrasive modification of matter: the connotations are of a chemical or mutilating type: the product 'kills' the dirt" (35). Cleaning powders, like Ajax, are more middleclass. Dirt is simply moved aside, and whiteness is achieved through this contrast, rather than through absolution.
This more suburban obsession with purity (and its concomitant low grade racism, the sort that leads to Knausgaard's unfortunate discussions of Africa as a single monolith) may be at the heart of other moments where Knausgaard obsesses about hygiene, as when he scrubs between John's legs so that he doesn't smell of urine, a "smell that stigmatized, belonging to children whose parents were less than rigorous with hygiene" (279). Does admitting these small anxieties about correct levels of cleanliness absolve Knausgaard of possible charges of fascism, of racism? Is self-diagnosis in part a cure? That Knausgaard often ruminates about the worth of his book while taking out the trash and doing laundry is, on one hand, his way of suggesting, "My book might be garbage. My book might need to be cleansed." On the other hand, one can't help but worry that Knausgaard believes he has inoculated himself against critique simply through these confessions, as if by correlating his own book with garbage he no longer has to feel responsible for propagating garbage ideas about race or sex or nation.
Here I am, trying to will myself to read a book that is too big to fit comfortably on my lap as I hold a newborn, a book whose insights into childrearing both fascinate and repel me, and whose insights into motherhood mostly just repel me. Geir's statement about Christina's investment in her role as a mother—"She had a superb job at the opera, but she quit that to spend as much time with Njaal as possible. Her doing all the practical stuff isn't because she's a woman, it's because it actually means something to her" (311)—is an example of the sort of garbage idea that Knausgaard puts at one remove from himself, so as, I suppose, to comfort his reader with the possibility that the idea might not be Knausgaard's own. It certainly is an idea endemic to totalitarian movements of the early 20th century, which imagined women as un-alienated from their domestic labor, unsullied by capitalism. Knausgaard puts into abeyance whether this idea is one he shares with Geir, just as he puts into abeyance the question, "Oh no, am I Hitler?" I'm aggravated by Knausgaard's predilection for playing around with ugly ideologies. Then again, I haven't even gotten to the Hitler essay yet. If I do, it's going to be because I downloaded Knausgaard's monstrous book onto my Kindle.
Yours ever,
Cecily
ALSO IN THIS SERIES:
The Slow Burn, v.2: Welcome Back
The Slow Burn, v.2: An Introduction
My Struggle, vol. 1: Cecily, June 6
My Struggle, vol. 1: Diana, June 9
My Struggle, vol. 1: Omari, June 14
My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, June 17
My Struggle, vol. 2: Omari, June 24
My Struggle, vol. 2: Cecily, July 1
My Struggle, vol. 2: Sarah Chihaya, July 5
My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, July 12
My Struggle, vol. 2: Diana, July 16
My Struggle, vol. 2: Jess Arndt, July 18
My Struggle, vol. 3: Omari, July 25
My Struggle, vol. 3: Ari M. Brostoff, August 1
My Struggle, vol. 3: Dan, August 4
My Struggle, vol. 3: Jacob Brogan, August 8My Struggle, vol. 3: Diana, August 12
My Struggle, vol. 4: Katherine Hill, August 25
My Struggle, vol. 4: Omari, September 1
My Struggle, vol. 4: Dan, September 2
My Struggle, vol. 4: Diana, September 15
My Struggle, vol. 5: Omari, September 27
My Struggle, vol. 5: Diana, October 3
My Struggle, vol. 5: Dan, October 13
My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, September 25
My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, September 28
My Struggle, vol. 6: Stephanie, October 5
My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, October 9
My Struggle, vol. 6: Emily Tamkin, October 10
My Struggle, vol. 6: Diana, October 15
My Struggle, vol. 6: Rachel Greenwald Smith, October 23
My Struggle, vol. 6: Katherine Hill, October 26
My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, October 31
My Struggle, vol. 6: Jess Arndt, November 6
My Struggle, vol. 6: Joshua Keating, November 12
My Struggle, vol. 6: Marit MacArthur, November 13
My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, November 20
My Struggle, vol. 6: Jacob Brogan, November 29